The Manga Curmudgeon

Spending too much on comics, then talking too much about them

May numbers

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ICv2 has posted Diamond’s graphic novel figures for May, and… wait, where the hell is all the manga? A piddling 13 books cracked the top 100 graphic novels this time around:

QtyRank – Manga Rank – Title – Pub – Est.Qty
19 – 1 – NARUTO VOL 14 TP – VIZ – 5,857
28 – 2 – BLEACH VOL 19 TP – VIZ – 3,758
33 – 3 – BERSERK VOL 17 TP (MR) – DAR – 3,581
42 – 4 – MEGATOKYO VOL 5 – DC – 2,868
43 – 5 – LOVELESS VOL 5 GN (Of 7) (TKP) (MR) – TKP – 2,812
50 – 6 – GUNSMITH CATS BURST VOL 1 TP – DAR – 2,492
56 – 7 – NEON GENESIS EVANGELION ANGELIC DAYS VOL 5 – ADV – 2,267
58 – 8 – NEGIMA VOL 14 GN (MR) – RAN – 2,107
66 – 9 – STREET FIGHTER ALPHA VOL 1 GN (Of 2) – UDO – 1,987
76 – 10 – SAMURAI DEEPER KYO VOL 22 GN (Of 38) (MR) – TKP – 1,779
96 – 11 – GUNSMITH CATS OMNIBUS VOL 2 TP – DAR – 1,330
97 – 12 – INITIAL D VOL 26 GN (Of 32) – TKP – 1,314
99 – 13 – LOVE MODE VOL 5 GN (Of 11) (MR) – TKP – 1,266

Though manga seems to be winning the war in terms of sales in general in places like bookstores, it lost this month’s Direct Market skirmish to Marvel’s Civil War crossover. Collections of the comics event scored 16 spots on the top 100 chart:

QtyRank – Title – Est.Qty
3 – CIVIL WAR CAPTAIN AMERICA TP – 10,023
4 – CIVIL WAR WOLVERINE TP – 8,853
6 – CIVIL WAR TP – 8,589
7 – CIVIL WAR FRONT LINE BOOK 2 TP – 8,156
9 – CIVIL WAR PETER PARKER SPIDER-MAN TP – 7,572
11 – CIVIL WAR YOUNG AVENGERS & RUNAWAYS TP – 6,955
13 – CIVIL WAR X-MEN UNIVERSE TP – 6,842
14 – CIVIL WAR WAR CRIMES TP – 6,426
16 – CIVIL WAR COMPANION TP – 6,161
17 – BLACK PANTHER CIVIL WAR TP – 6,073
35 – CIVIL WAR AMAZING SPIDER-MAN TP – 3,557
52 – CIVIL WAR FRONT LINE BOOK 1 TP – 2,436
60 – CIVIL WAR X-MEN TP – 2,099
69 – CIVIL WAR ROAD TO CIVIL WAR TP – 1,891
79 – CIVIL WAR FANTASTIC FOUR TP – 1,651
98 – CIVIL WAR THUNDERBOLTS TP – 1,306

I have to say that if I ran a comic shop, even one that conscientiously tried to have a wide selection, I would have ordered a whole bunch of Civil War trades. It was big, it was successful, and it the core audience for that sort of thing (which must constitute a healthy chunk of just about any comic shop’s clientele) ate it up.

One mini-trend that I noticed in May’s list was the success of what I’d call “library books”:

QtyRank – Title – Pub – Est.Qty
8 – MOUSE GUARD VOL 1 FALL 1152 HC – ARS – 7,604
18 – PLAIN JANES – DC – 6,049
32 – RUNAWAYS VOL 3 HC – MAR – 3,614
65 – KORGI VOL 1 TP – TOP – 2,011
84 – RUNAWAYS VOL 3 GOOD DIE YOUNG DIGEST TP MAR 1,602

The success of Mouse Guard’s handsome collection indicates that interest hasn’t waned in the sleeper hit (and it can’t be a sleeper hit any longer, can it?), boding well for the sequel which is just about to drop.

DC must be happy that its returnability retailer outreach for The Plain Janes had a happy ending. I was surprised to see the shop in my area order shelf copies, since it’s not the kind of book they’d usually over-order. Runaways continues to do really well in collection, and the very pretty Korgi makes an extremely respectable showing.

Quick comic comments: Shojo Beat 7/7

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I’m not a regular reader of Viz’s Shojo Beat magazine, but I had to pick up the anniversary issue (July 2007) because of the excerpt from Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight (which is accompanied by some very nice text pieces on Tezuka).

I hope that, beyond just celebrating the milestone with something special, Viz is testing the waters and seeing if there’s sufficient reader interest to release the series in digest form. Just judging by the short, disconnected chapters shown here, it looks like a treat. It always amazes me that Tezuka’s work can seem classic and immediate, timeless without being dated or stuffy. I’d love to read more of Princess Knight.

Other random thoughts about the issue:

  • It’s a really cohesive visual package. I’m not crazy about every aesthetic choice, like the colored ink for the manga chapters, but it’s attractive and eye-catching overall. I particularly liked the old-fashioned treatment on the Princess Knight pages.
  • I still don’t think I’d buy the magazine regularly. There aren’t enough series in it that I want to read in short chunks. The one that strikes me as hitting the mark for that kind of reading is, oddly enough, Baby & Me. It’s nothing that I want to collect in digest form, but I enjoyed reading twenty or so pages of it.
  • I don’t know if any more confirmation was needed, but the last serialized chapter of Nana will appear in the August issue, to be replaced by Honey and Clover in September. Sand Chronicles replaces the just-completed Yume Kira Dream Shoppe in the August issue, and Haruka replaces Baby & Me in November.
  • It’s fun seeing advertisements for books from a bunch of different publishers (Vertical, CMX, Juné) in the magazine. There’s just something collegial about it.
  • The ad for Midtown Comics reminds me that the store offers a very pleasant shopping experience.

    • He should know

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    I know it’s probably bad manners to link to my own blog, but I thought Matt Thorn’s summary of his Japanese students’ response to western comics was so interesting that I wanted to highlight it:

    “Just as Americans are reluctant to watch foreign (non-English-language) films, Japanese are for the most part unwilling to read comics that are ‘backwards,’ in which the text is horizontal rather than vertical, which have a large amount of per page, and which, well, aren’t manga.”

    Insert "flexing muscles" pun here

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    According to this piece in Publishers Weekly (found via Blog@Newsarama), DC has joined forces with Flex Comix, a newish Japanese manga company that provides digital content for handheld devices, with eventual collections in print. Why would they do such a thing?

    “DC Comics president Paul Levitz described Flex Comi[x] as an ‘innovative force.’ Flex Comi[x] CEO Seiji Takakura said the new venture ‘will bring authentic Japanese manga to the worldwide English-language audience in new and exciting ways.’”

    That strongly suggests Flex’s interest is in building with a U.S. manga imprint to facilitate English-language licenses for its properties. And while DC probably wouldn’t mind having a first-look relationship with a Japanese publisher, something tells me that’s not their only interest in the partnership.

    Simon Jones of Icarus Publishing notes:

    “[T]his news combines manga, one of the biggest stories in the past ten years of comics, with alternative digital distribution, which may be the biggest news for the next ten. This will, at the very least, give DC valuable experience in both key areas as they develop a future online strategy for their own domestic output.”

    I think the experience is probably the key attraction. DC doesn’t seem to have trouble securing interesting properties for its CMX roster so much as marketing those titles as successfully as some of their competitors in the category. And given that Flex is in its early days in terms of content creation (it’s only seven months old), there’s no guarantee that it will funnel solid sellers (or even licensable properties, as Jones notes) into CMX.

    So that leaves digital distribution as the likeliest lure, which certainly makes sense. I suspect that any licenses DC picks up from Flex will be gravy, and that the success or failure will rest on the portability of Flex’s business plan and how it helps DC to position itself to digitally distribute its own properties when handheld technology catches up. (I think digital distribution of DC’s properties in Japan would also fall into the category of gravy, though I don’t know enough about the demand for U.S. comics in Japan to parse that. Every source I’ve run across indicates that demand isn’t exactly roaring, though.)

    Shelf space

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    We went up to Pittsburgh last night and stopped at one of the older Borders. They’ve made some changes to their layout, swapping the graphic novels and manga with the fiction and literature, if you can believe it. The comics sections seem to have expanded somewhat, but especially the graphic novels. The manga selection doesn’t seem to be any more diverse, though the selection of other graphic novels seems like it’s a lot more comprehensive.

    The store’s layout is kind of weird. It’s on two floors, with a big opening down to the lower level. The graphic novels and manga used to be on the shelves running along the railing around the opening, the new home of Hamingway and Austen and their ilk. Now the comics on the main walls, and they’re some of the first things you see when you walk in. They also seem to have moved some of their other shelving units so that they could set up a seating area near the manga, which makes sense.

    There were a few kids reading manga in some chairs near the shelves, but there were more thirty-something men looking at the graphic novels, which was a change of pace. Those DC Showcase editions seemed to be the big draw.

    Friday links

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    I’m disappointed that the producers of the Nancy Drew movie went with a Brady Bunch-ish “from the land of retro” approach to the material, but I always enjoy reading A.O. Scott’s reviews for The New York Times:

    “But as it is, ‘Nancy Drew’ stands as an example of how to take a foolproof, time-tested formula — a young detective using smarts and determination to solve a case — and mess it up with superficial cleverness and pandering hackwork.”

    If you’re looking for a revisionist approach to Ms. Drew and her peers in adolescent sleuthing, I’d recommend Mabel Maney’s Nancy Clue/Cherry Aimless books. They’re slash-tastic!

    *

    I don’t know if I’d call Ai Morinaga’s Your and My Secret a guilty pleasure, but I’m always glad to see some love for this unfortunately abandoned ADV series, especially if it comes from someone as smart as Katherine Dacey-Tsuei.

    *

    Quote of the week, possibly the month:

    “If DC had published a comic featuring a seductively posed zombie Lois Lane, its hardcore partisans would just want to know which Earth it was taking place on.”

    — Dick Hyacinth

    Adventures in consumerism

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    If you hold up the checkout line at the comic shop to denounce Patrick Stewart for his disrespect for Star Trek fandom, concluding loftily that you’d even rather have lunch with William Shatner, who’s crazy, then I will be forced to make fun of you after you leave. I’m not made of stone. I’ll also be forced to defend Stewart based on his impeccable Shakespearean background and smoking hotness.

    *

    My irony detector must be on the fritz, because it’s taken me forever to snicker at the spectacle of Marvel actually turning its characters into shambling, cannibalistic, soulless corpses in pursuit of profit. It’s so meta that it’s almost daring.

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    I was chatting with a friend, and we decided that there are certain instant indicators that let us know if we’ll enjoy our comic shop experience. If there are all-ages comics, collections of strips, and art books up front, all’s clear. If merchandise like that Emma Frost bust is anywhere up front, it’s “Think of England” time. It just seems smarter to go wide at the point of entrance and keep the more esoteric, potentially off-putting, fannish behind a few layers of innocuousness.

    *

    On the subject of that bust, we couldn’t reach any conclusion as to what purpose those scraps of fabric were supposed to serve. My friend wondered if Frost practiced telekinesis in addition to telepathy, as she could think of any other way that they’d stay up. I thought they might be surgical dressing following a breast lift.

    *

    The local library has started to carry graphic novels, though they shelve them according to the Dewey Decimal System, upstairs in the non-fiction stacks. That would explain why all of those volumes of Fruits Basket are so pristine, though not why Castle Waiting has been read within an inch of its life. Maybe somebody donated it after they’d read it to pieces and then bought themselves a new copy. That seems reasonable.

    Anyway, it’s not a great selection, but it’s a start. The current holdings are a mix of popular manga, classics and stuff that they probably got for free.

    You're standing on my neck

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    I love manga, but I’m just not that much of a fan of anime. There are a couple of series that I’ve really enjoyed, but animated versions of manga tend to leave me cold, for whatever reason.

    That’s not to say I don’t love cartoons, though, and TZG2.0’s Myk gave me the opportunity to blather on about one of my all-time favorites, Daria, in a guest entry. I never would have thought one of the shows I can watch over and over and over again, animated or otherwise, would be A. originally aired by MTV or B. a spin-off of Beavis and Butthead, but I guess life is strange like that.

    Pace yourselves

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    The run of relatively low-key weeks is apparently over, as the comics industry unleashes an avalanche of interesting-sounding new releases and new volumes of much-loved series. (The ComicList even goes so far as to pull out a manga-only version of the Wednesday roster.)

    The Aviary, by Jamie Tanner (AdHouse): The publisher sent me a review copy of this, and it’s a very odd work. Visually, it reminds me of Rick Geary’s work on the Treasury of Victorian Murder series (see below) with a bit of Rebecca Kraatz’s House of Sugar (Tulip Tree) thrown into the mix. Tonally, it’s somewhere near Renee French territory, but bleaker and more caustic. It’s going to take a few more readings before I can pin down exactly how I feel about it, but it’s certainly interesting, unsettling, and great looking.

    King of Thorn, by Yuji Iwahara (Tokyopop): You’re probably sick of me mentioning how much I loved Chikyu Misaki (CMX), but that’s the reason I’m so excited about this series. Iwahara demonstrated a great blend of complex plotting, thoughtful characterization, and stylish visuals, and I’m hoping those qualities recur in this series.

    Shojo Beat (Viz): I love a lot of the series in the Shojo Beat roster, but I generally don’t bother to pick up the magazine since I’d rather buy the ones I like in digest form. But this issue features and excerpt from Osamu Tezuka’s groundbreaking shôjo series, Princess Knight, so it’s a must-buy.

    Re-Gifters, by Mike Carey, Sonny Liew and Mark Hempel (DC-Minx): Interest in the Minx initiative aside, I loved My Faith in Frankie (DC-Vertigo), also from this creative team. I’m glad to see them reunited.

    Treasury of Victorian Murder Vol. 9: The Bloody Benders, by Rick Geary (NBM): I’m cheap, so I generally wait for these to come out in paperback, but I’m a huge fan of Geary’s retellings of twisted crimes from days gone by. I’m completely unfamiliar with the featured case this time around, so this installment should let me increase my stores of grisly trivia.

    And here’s the daunting list of new volumes of manga series I enjoy:

  • The Drifting Classroom Vol. 6, by Kazuo Umezi (Viz – Signature)
  • Emma Vol. 4, by Kaoru Mori, (CMX)
  • Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs Vol. 3, by Yukiya Sakuragi (Viz)
  • Naoki Urasawa’s Monster Vol. 8 (Viz – Signature)
  • Sgt. Frog Vol. 13, by Mine Yoshizaki (Tokyopop)
  • Wild Adapter Vol. 2, by Kazuya Minekura (Tokyopop)

    • Lazy days

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    Okay, I admit that this week’s Flipped isn’t one for the ages, but hopefully someone will find it useful. What can I say? I spent too much of the weekend engrossed in computer games.